POLITICALLY CORRECT MARTIAL ARTS?

 By Phillip Starr

I remember when karate tournaments first began in this country. The year was 1963. I was too young to go to Chicago to compete...in fact, it would be five more years before I was able to go to St. Louis and participate for the first time (in the First Gateway Open Karate Tournament hosted by Bob Yarnall). In those days, competition was extremely fierce and when you entered kata competition, your kata had better be precise (to put it very mildly).

With the passage of time, I began to notice that things were beginning to slip. A competitor would enter the arena, announce the name of his kata, and then perform something that was close to, but not exactly that particular form. Two or three different techniques or stances had been inserted here and there. Upon closing his performance, the contestant would be called up to the judging panel (which was very common) and asked about it (most or all of the officials were very familiar with most katas back then). Oftentimes, they were told that the competitor's teacher had taught it to him that way!

At first, the officials would call the teacher himself to the front and chew on him him pretty good for changing the kata but eventually, they stopped doing this...”Well, if his teacher taught him to do it that way, then he did a good job”, they'd say. “We should score him on level of difficulty” and so on. Of course, I disagreed. “If we do that”, I said, “Then where does it end? Some guy can walk in here and do a homemade set and claim that that was what his teacher taught him...” And of course, that's exactly what happened. But the tournament officials were more concerned about not hurting anyone's feelings than demanding traditional kata and ensuring that they were done properly.

Enter the gong-fu stylists. Until then, kata competition consisted of traditional Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean sets. The officials either practiced a good number of them themselves or were very familiar with them. There was no escaping their sharp eyes. But the Chinese forms were virtually unknown to them, so they had to rely on other factors such as level of difficulty, and so on.

Before long, things really went sideways. One nationally-renowned female competitor (who went on to star in the film industry) performed a nice long-fist set (attired in a rather revealing, form-fitting top that proudly displayed certain fine physical attributes) and ended with a twirl that placed her cross-legged on the ground with her hands spread apart like a dying swan and her head bowed so that her long blonde hair draped over her front. I called her to the fore and asked the application of that final movement. “Oh, I took that from modern dance”, she said. I thanked her and when the time came to score her, I gave her a 1.0 for having the guts to perform such a homemade mess in front of God and everyone, She was furious! Other officials, impressed with her, uh....attributes, scored her considerably higher.

Eventually, things became so bizarre that special form divisions had to be devised for competitors who preferred to perform “eclectic” (now known as “extreme”) forms, which meant that they were entirely homemade. These exercises had/have no martial application whatsoever. They are simply the martial arts' answer to gymnastics.

The same kind of thing happened to sparring competition, especially after the advent of padded protective gear. Instead of crisp reverse punches, backfists, and front snap kicks, we began to see right hooks and left jabs. In Japan, attempting to use such techniques can and will get you disqualified for failure to use proper martial arts technique.

What began as “politically correct” officiating ultimately gave birth to what we often witness in modern, “open” competition. Is it possible to reverse what has happened to martial arts competition and go back to the days when clean, sharp, traditional technique and kata were insisted upon?